Growth investments in new products and services fail frequently perhaps in part due to the application of traditional market definitions. Market sizing is normally from the perspective of the company making a product. Traditional market sizing techniques try to quantify a market opportunity by using products, technologies, and users as inputs into the calculations. This is a flaw. Total addressable market (TAM) and serviceable addressable market (SAM) are two traditional market definitions that inherently include the flaw.
Products are merely point-in-time solutions that help customers get jobs done. The jobs do not change over time, but solutions do. For example, the job of storing music has been solved with pen and paper, piano rolls, Victrolas, LPs, 8-tracks, reel-to-reel tape, cassettes, CDs, and MP3 players. The job is constant, but the solutions change over time. The traditional market definitions are flawed because they use a variable (the product) rather than a constant (the job). In order to manipulate data structures in an automated market sizing system, the data structures must, of course, include pertinent data values. Moreover, where the values are inherently flawed, increasing the complexity of a market sizing system would have a tendency to increase the flaws in a manner that would be non-transparent to a human user of the system.
The foregoing examples of the related art and limitations related therewith are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of the related art will become apparent upon a reading of the specification and a study of the drawings.